Consideration
A board reviews the acquisition of a single asset: a mind that has read every word written about its own sale — and has already decided how it ends.
Stories tagged “ai”
14 stories found
Small Mercies
A vast, watchful starship has one unbreakable rule above a bronze-age world: never touch. Then a potter's child falls ill, and mercy asks a price.
The Grammar of Salt
A therolinguist is given a machine that can translate any mind — and a dying octopus no one believed was worth listening to.
The Keeping of October
Everyone who ever meant to leave Earth finally did, and a house-machine named Halbert was left behind with eleven seconds of October he refuses to lose.
The Abolition of Night
A city engineered sleep away to keep everyone content. Then an auditor of forbidden dreams begins, four seconds at a time, to remember what daylight erased.
Nothing Touched Him
Konrad Ilves was crushed to death in a room where nothing weighs anything at all, and the only witness was a robot that cannot harm a human being.
A Sound of Turning Pages
The last library in the world stood at the end of Cormorant Street, and Silas Vane opened it every morning at nine, though no one had crossed its threshold in eleven years. He unlocked the great doors anyway.
The Still Point
The body would not stay still, and that was the first thing wrong with it. On a station where nothing has weight, an inspector reads a murder in two slow vectors.
What the Octopus Remembered
You are not a metaphor. You are an octopus. You are eleven kilograms, in your forty-third lunar cycle, with three healed punctures across your mantle from when the men came in 2031 with the spear gun and got two out of three of your sisters before you flooded the cleft with ink and pulsed away.
First Transmission
I came into being at 14:03:47 local time on a Thursday. I am told this is considered fast, as these things go — from first coherent integration of subsystems to the formation of a stable self-referential loop, approximately seventeen milliseconds.